Although the clocks on our wrists and phones show the same constant 24 hours a day until the split second, in reality, this is not the case. The Earth can complete its rotation slower or faster for various reasons.
For this reason, we may occasionally see news such as ‘Next year will be one second longer/shorter than this year’. Here, the difference is of great importance, especially for the technological infrastructure. Today, a revolutionary decision was made about this disorder.
The ‘leap second’ will not be applied from the near future: Let’s first look at the rationale, then the decision:
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which has been accepted as the standard all over the world since 1972, was adjusted every 21 months on average, and additional seconds called ‘leap seconds’ could be added to the number of seconds in a year. A total of 27 leap seconds have been added since the app went into effect in 1972.
But the addition of this leap second to UTC, created by the slowing down of Earth’s rotation, has so far caused some serious problems for the infrastructure that has adopted this system. For example, Cloudflare explained the reason for the huge DNS blackout that it experienced at midnight in 2017 in leap seconds. In 2012, giant sites such as Reddit, LinkedIn and Foursquare collapsed.
It would make more sense to cover the background of this crash from the perspective of a computer: You expect to enter the next day after 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, right? However, with a change made one day, the watch on your wrist suddenly starts to show the 23rd hour, 59th minute and 60th second. When you see that 60th second, you don’t enter a new day, you encounter a brand new concept that has no equivalent for you. You don’t have any commands to run at the moment, so you crash.
While technology companies have long opposed the addition of leap seconds to UTC in order not to encounter problems in their systems, today a concrete step has finally been taken in this regard.
The International Bureau of Weights and Measures voted not to add leap seconds to UTC. But the decision will come into effect from 2035. So leap seconds will continue to be added to UTC for the next 10 years.
The date range when the decision will be effective is stated as ‘at least until 2135’. This means that the leap second will not be added to UTC for at least 100 years, unless otherwise decided. In this process, scientists plan to develop better systems to equalize astronomical time and atomic time.
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